Many electronic cameras include firmware adapted to determine appropriate white-balance, or color adjustment, parameters and to perform an automatic white balance of an image.
In some prior systems, each camera of a group of cameras used to capture images intended for stitching into panoramic or 360-degree surrounding images, or wide format images compatible with the formats often used in motion picture theaters, has been permitted to determine its color-balance and/or exposure-control parameters individually. Once each camera has identified these parameters, they are applied at that camera to images photographed by that camera before the images are transferred to the host system. When this occurs, differences between color-balance and/or exposure control parameters determined by each camera can cause visible artifacts in the stitched image—especially at boundaries where individual camera images are spliced and large uniformly-colored objects or background crosses those boundaries. For example, a splice line with sky of different color shades or brightness may become visible if blue sky background is processed by each camera with different color-balance and/or exposure parameters.
Should additional corrections for color, brightness, and contrast be performed on the host for each camera image to be spliced, substantial processing time on the host may be required.